The stories on them, told in a brief phrase, are mostly heartbreaking, sometimes uplifting, always relevant. "Executed for making fun of the Führer", "Deported and gassed for hiding Jewish neighbors", "Survived concentration camp but parents, siblings and relatives did not make it out alive".
Totalitarian nightmares have no humor. If you think, your favourite thing in life shoul dbe spared jokes and jests, you are heading right towards that spot. Nothing should be sacrosanct to jokes.
I raise my glass to those who walked into the fence, taking theire workforce awaz from the fuehrer and his germinions.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shoah_(film)
They did many of these interviews in the 70’s so a little more than 30 years after the Holocaust.
Seeing them interview some farmer who was 20 at the time and lived near the village of Auschwitz and remembers seeing the trains going in full of people and coming out empty really hits home as it all happened in the midst of people just living their lives.
Although I see these stones all over Vienna, and find myself in contemplation every single time I see them elsewhere around Europe, it is even more jarring to see them in a seemingly random outer suburb/town of the region at the footstep of a local grocery store, and is a severely jarring reminder of the atrocities that occurred in this land, not so long ago.
I wish Australia, my native land, would have the courage to do something similar to highlight the atrocities we committed there, on the original peoples. Alas, Australian war hubris is too heavy to pierce that veil ..
Additionally I have similar feelings about the atrocities committed by the UK. To me it feels so unambiguously right to officially acknowledge and apologise that our ancestors did pretty heinous shit (up to and including invading countries this century).
My Finnish friend is super into history and he basically remembers the events of history by it's relative position in time to a European war. There were so many horrific wars.
The stories of past highlight the worst parts of human nature, but many people got by in love without murdering the locals next door.
We should turn away from evil and denouce it. The apology for it, suggests a naive belief one is separate from that human nature which drove the crimes.
Maybe with more lead in air from leaded petrol, or more internet radicalization, or an end to our local agriculture, we might be the 1% that turns toward evil. Examining past crimes can lead to more crime, as we have seen with internet radicals lately and copycat people following news media stories.
Studying that sh*t and mulling it over in apology for crimes one never did is dangerous, we should move towards loving the good things done, past and future.
But for something like the Mau Mau massacre, for the Iraq War, for the Afghanistan War or for any number of atrocities in British India or anything like that - these were huge events whose effects can still be felt today. I don't think it is unreasonable to expect some sort of official apology from the state. Or failing that - simply allowing a level of acknowledgement in our History curriculum that says "The British Empire was not good, and was in fact quite often bad for a very long period of time" might help. Because right now doing so is walking on very thin ice[1] and there are a lot of people walking around in the UK who think our imperial project was one which colonised and civilised, rather than brutalised it.
[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massacre_of_Glencoe
[1] - https://www.gov.uk/government/news/guidance-on-promoting-bri...
But the Kenyan view that the Mau Mau were heroic freedom fighters and colonialism was bad, is painfully simplistic. The Mau Mau started the war by murdering innocents, they killed their own people if they did not swear an oath of alliegance and they escalated the brutality every step of the way.
The real Kenyans who wanted nothing to do with either the Brits or the Mau Mau are nearly completely unrecognized and yet the political narrative is dominated by the impacts of war, resources and money.
Your second link doesn't suggest anything to do with the British Empire. The values it's advertising are bog standard secular democratic stuff. The values of the British Empire were more religious, monarchical and imperialistic.
If this is the anti-empire narrative then it is disappointly anemic. Tribes who escalate economic warfare to the level of pure psychopathy and a small british colony that escalates to respond in war-camp, torturous kind, is not a good face value judgement of the largest empire the planet's seen, and all the good that it brought.
This shows a severe lack of empathy. Put yourself in the shoes of a people whose immediate relatives and ancestors were annihilated by the same social order currently running the country. You might see a use for apologies.
We Australians don't have the courage that Austrians do, when it comes to acknowledging the criminal actions of our past society. Alas, the struggle for acknowledgement is real. A lot of it has to do with the fact that Australias concentration camps and genocide programs were performed in seriously remote locations, far far away from any civil population - so its a lot easier to hide.
The camp at Mauthausen can be seen from the local countryside and is clearly maintained to be a visible reminder of extremist totalitarian/authoritarianism to the children who visit it, regularly, as part of their education. That courage is something for which the Austrian people should be proud.
Sort of a lingering, inherited shame. If that makes sense :)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_massacres_of_Indigenou...
When I was in US high school, so much time was spent focusing on the atrocities of the US that many of my peers left with the impression that the US is a horrible country not worth fighting for.
Interestingly, activating that feeling of nihilism is the goal of Russian propaganda in the US.
We must avoid the "blame Russia" response and be honest about our own states' vast and heinous crimes against humanity - lest, indeed, we become Russia.
I very much believe that this is the intention, but does it actually though? Oppressive country frequently brings up the past as a safe way to legitimize the present. Russia seems to have had an increase in this in recent years as it now started a war in Europe. Most of the western world seems to not have learned much at all from the second world war and are yet again running black sites, funneling money to regimes and fighting wars to defend some of them.
Unfortunately I think part of the popularity of these stone today is that they are no longer provocative. Their existence doesn't seem to have the effect of for example highlighting still exiting companies participation in the holocaust, current day trade policies or crimes against humanity. Putting one of these outside a company, judge or commander involved in past or present atrocities would probably result in it quickly being removed and you potentially landing in jail.
But I guess that even if few learns the bigger lesson they might still be a net positive.
It makes no difference if a person was killed for ridiculing Fuhrer, hiding Jews or refusing to serve vodka[0]. Death is death and I hope one day humanity understands no war makes sense and we stop this insanity, working together to make everybody's lives better, not just one nation we happen to be associated with.
[0] https://uarefugees.news/hot-news/in-bucha-the-invaders-shot-...
It's important to give countenance to the fact that democracy, human rights, the rule of law,... in and of itself aren't measures against populism and authoritarianism. By and large, the success of the latter is tied into resentment over key social and economic factors which determine the strength of social cohesion and a sense of equity.
If a state doesn't invest in the common interests of its citizenry, over time that will create breeding grounds for people to become resentful, distrustful, tribal, isolated,... The identity politics of populists and authoritarians by and large revolve "we against them" narratives. These are incredibly easy to understand and provide a new framework of meaning and values to disenfranchised people. Minorities become prime targets because they are visibly different and therefor easy to pick out and used as scapegoats. That's what fractures an erstwhile democratic, cohesive society.
In Germany, the NSDAP only became successful after 1932, when the effects of the Depression came into full swing in an already unstable political climate of the Weimar Republic.
You're right, though, that in a way, the remembrance of the Holocaust doesn't resolve in a clear, consistent moral framework of principles. Just think about how restitution of property and real estate is still a hotly debated topic today. The crux is that questions regarding historic responsibility and guilt and how to approach them are always framed into a backdrop of present day economical and political concerns and interests. And that's just collective behavior that can be changed with an easy silver bullet fix.
> Unfortunately I think part of the popularity of these stone today is that they are no longer provocative.
I highly doubt that. On an individual level, humans are very much capable of feeling empathy and compassion. For instance, the Auschwitz-Birkenau memorial received a record 2.3 million visitors in 2019. The unspeakable atrocities that happened there still resonate to this very day. If not for countless children and grand-children still deal with a lost connection to their own shared past through the loss of their family in the camps; and the stories that are still begin shared publicly of that great sorrow.
The thing that should worry us is people either not even noticing the stones and their significance in the first place, or forgetting their significance the minute they've passed and falling back into biased thinking regarding present day state of the world.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-ukraine-parliament-langua...
> (2019) "The law, which obliges all citizens to know the Ukrainian language and makes it a mandatory requirement for civil servants, soldiers, doctors, and teachers, was championed by outgoing President Petro Poroshenko."
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/may/21/ukraine-bans-s...
> (2015) "Dunja Mijatović, the representative for the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe on freedom of the media, said the “broadly and vaguely defined language” in the anti-communist law “could easily lead to suppression of political, provocative and critical speech, especially in the media”. The US Holocaust Memorial Museum also condemned the independence-fighter legislation."
Imagine, for comparison, if a right-wing government in Washington tried to make all Spanish-speaking U.S. citizens second-class citizens, while incorporating the KKK into the military forces of the United States, as Ukraine did with the Nazi revivalist group Azov Battalion? These are the kind of actions that led to the rise of Russian separatist movements in eastern Ukraine and Crimea, and which Putin ultimately used as part of his political justification for the invasion of Ukraine.
The situation is now so completely embittered that it's hard to see a resolution where the Russian-speaking population in eastern Ukraine and Crimea would ever agree to exist under the control of a western Ukrainian government.
Russian propaganda loves pointing to the same few cases of Nazism in Ukraine. Ok, lets see that Russian propaganda misses at home - that for example is the Roskosmos CEO Rogozin, one of the most prominent voices around Putin and the Putin's favorite giving a Nazi salute and the end of his Nazi speech at the Russian Nazi march in Moscow. The specific phrase they all give Nazi salute to is "Glory to Russia!".
https://youtu.be/xkXVVcPWSU8?t=87
And for that antique Nazist paraphernalia that some Azov members supposedly had... Well, this is the Main Cathedral of Russian forces built in 2020 where they store various Hitler's "relics" (yep, exactly that term - "relikviya" - was used here by the Russian top military leadership!) including his uniform, medals, etc. and where walls and floor is made out of German's tank metal - basically they made a Hitler shrine (and can make a good money organizing pilgrimage here for the neo-Nazis across the world :).
https://images.theconversation.com/files/449001/original/fil...
Anyway, Russia is a full blown nazist state today like Germany was in 1939 and whatever Russia says, in particular about nazims, is worthless at best, and usually is just outright propaganda lie.
>the Russian-speaking population in eastern Ukraine and Crimea would ever agree
Definitely nobody is asking that population today. The Russian puppet regimes on those territories are terrorist states just like ISIS - the only difference is that ISIS preferred public beheadings while in those Donbass "republics" they kidnap and torture with fate of many unknown, though few mutilated bodies found so far of such disappeared people suggest that there is no good fate to expect.
>It's important to note that elements in Ukraine si nce 2014 pushed a series of oppressive legal restrictions on the Russian-speaking segment of the population that were designed to push that entire group into second-class citizen state.
That wasn't push against Russian speaking population. That was push against various symbols of the totalitarian regime of USSR. In particular removing names from public places of the USSR leaders who ordered/led mass killings of millions of people, ie. Lenin, Stalin, and their close associates in that, etc.
The requirement for Ukrainian usage in Ukraine is the same for Russian-speaking as for say Hungarian- or Romanian-speaking minorities.
I am thankful that these exists and getting reminded now and then is, at least for me, really important and outline in some kind of tiny fraction, how many families suffered the same fate.
So you are saying we should be reminded and think about the horrors of Nazi's every day and everywhere?