Browsing through the new releases at a local bookshop I found a new book by Robert Fisk. I was most surprised since he died in 2020, so I leafed through it and yes, it is definitely a Robert Fisk book; Night of Power: The betrayal of the Middle East. It covers the Middle East and its troubles from the Iraq war to the Syrian civil war. Chapter 8, titled ‘The Israeli Empire’ opens with:

“When Israelis commemorated the Second Holocaust of the twentieth century January 2010, I was at the Gulbenkian Library in Jerusalem, holding records of the victims of the century’s First Holocaust. It was a strange sensation. The Armenians were not participating in the official ceremonies to remember six million Jews murdered by the Nazis, perhaps because Israel refuses to acknowledge that Armenia’s million and a half dead of 1915-23 were victims of a Turkish holocaust.”

To be fair, the remembrance was of Jewish victims of the Nazi holocaust. The commemoration was in Jerusalem, so it really was not a commemoration of the Armenian genocide earlier in the century. However, it has always bothered me that when considering the holocaust, the number 6 million is used to describe the number of victims when in reality the number slaughtered was many more, according to one source, as many as 17 million people were killed of which 6 million were Jews. The others, non consequential, not Jews, easily forgotten 11 million people included up to 500,000 Romani, Gypsies, 270,000 disabled people, 80,000 Freemasons, 1.8 million Poles, 1,700 Jehovah’s Witnesses, and then Serbs, Russians, both civilians and prisoners of war, and other ‘undesirables’. But not important enough to be considered in the commemoration.

Holocaust is defined as ‘destruction or slaughter on a mass scale caused by fire or nuclear war’ and so is actually a very limited term to use for a genocidal event. It originates in the Greek language, meaning ‘burnt offering’, so I guess when we consider the crematoria ovens used by the Nazis, it is pertinent, but that covers only a proportion of those killed, many more were shot and buried in mass graves. So perhaps the Armenian slaughter was not a holocaust, just a genocidal event. The bombing of Nagasaki and Hiroshima to end the war in the Pacific costing around 250,000 lives could be defined as a Holocaust, as could the Rwandan genocide of 1994 where in 100 days 800,000 people were slaughtered by Hutu extremists, many herded into churches which were then set alight.

However the mass slaughter is defined, there have been quite a few in the last 124 years, yet it seems there is only one which is remembered.

Starting with 2024 and going back to World War II, periodically genocides have continued and millions have been killed in religious and ethnic wars.

The Post WWII period is significant because the world was shocked by the atrocities of that war and acted to try to stop future such atrocities through having the newly created United Nations defining human rights in the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights which all member states signed, creating a court to deal with such atrocities, the International Court of Justice and to create a safe land for Jews in forming the State of Israel as a land to be shared, co-habited by Jews and the existing population of Palestinians. Two ‘peoples’ living side by side in what was the Palestinian protectorate under British control between WWI and WWII.

Darfur – a region of Sudan – has been the scene of government sponsored violence with a campaign of slaughter, rape starvation and displacement since 2003. It is estimated that that over 400,000 people have died, 2,500,000 people displaced from their homes, over 200,000 have joined the ever-growing refugee population of stateless people. Currently there is an ongoing war between the Sudanese Armed Forces and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces.

The Rohingya people of Myanmar are suffering an ongoing genocidal action by the military government with around 1.3 million refugees having fled to Bangladesh and Thailand and over 43,000 killed as the Rohingya people are seen as Bengali refugees and are denied citizenship, so are seen as ‘illegals’, and unwanted.

We can go on and on and on, Rwanda, Cambodia, Srebrenica, Sri Lanka, ISIS… the list is long, the causes differ from religious difference to ethnicity, and no matter the best intentions of organisations such as the UN, the Red Cross, and the many humanitarian societies there are, it seems that there is always one group who wants to get rid of another, there is always some leader wanting to assert authority in the most brutal of fashions.

Image from iol.co.za (Photo by Shakirah Thebus)

But getting back to that book I picked up, the fearlessness of an honest, straight shooting journalist who is prepared to look beyond the bullshit presented by politicians, the self-serving crap which the most powerful use to legitimise their position. Robert Fisk knew history, he understood the power dynamics, the ruthlessness of leaders who needed to assert their power and dominance. The arrogance of the sense of superiority such as that of imperialists and colonisers. The history of domination and sense of superiority is ancient. The last chapter in the Night of Power is ‘The Surgeon with the Bloodstained hands’ and is prefaced with a quotation from Victor Hugo on the massacre of Greek civilians by Ottoman Turks in Crete, published 17 February 1867, Kleio newspaper, Trieste.

“Meanwhile the Turks enter the village… where there are only women and children, and when they leave, we see only a few corpses, large and small. And public opinion? What does it do? What does it say? Nothing…. These catastrophes are a ‘misfortune’… Six or seven major powers conspire against a small people. What is this conspiracy? The most cowardly of all. The conspiracy of silence… But thunder it is not. The thunder comes from above and, in language of politicians, it’s called the thunder of revolution.”

The conspiracy of silence is in the news coverage every day, as mainstream media and politicians effectively take sides in the genocides we see, or are dismissive of those deemed unimportant, like the conflict in Sudan which is largely ignored, or the plight of Rohingya people in Myanmar, the aftermath of the Iraq war with the rise of ISIS, the plight of the Kurdish people in Northern Iraq when Saddam Hussein waged war on them using weaponry from the US, or the brutality of the Iraq/Iran war of the 1980s.

That conspiracy of silence, when considered in the current conflict in Gaza and the West Bank made the Hamas attack of October 7 last year out to be a horrific act which came from nowhere, except that for 75 years Palestinians have been caged in the Gaza Strip, totally dependent on life’s necessities from Israel which begrudgingly has provided those necessities, and turned the supply lines off when they wanted to, and the various time Palestinians have objected, lobbed a bomb over the fence to harmlessly explode in a field, Israel is “mowing the lawn” as Benjamin Netanyahu so eloquently described attacks on Gaza. The growth of settlements in The West Bank, while an occasional headline points to the illegality under international law of those settlements, proceed almost without comment, but very little is mentioned of the constant harassment and deprivations suffered by the Palestinians and Bedouin people who have lived there for countless generations, whose lands are taken whose villages are bulldozed, whose water supplies are destroyed.

Violence begets violence, ‘mowing the lawn’ leads to intifadas, uprisings against the treatment of Palestinians from 1987 to 1993 and in the 2000s.

Despite the best intentions by the international community through the United Nations after WWII, it seems nothing has changed.

Holocausts, or the more correct term, genocide continues, women and children are mercilessly disposed of and no one bats an eye lid. The weapons of war; bombs, guns, land mines, and all the other ‘essentials’ are supplied by major western countries; the USA, Britain, France to mention just a few, and yes, Australia is in that list, a smaller economy, a smaller supplier, but supplier of the means of indiscriminate killing nonetheless.

Oh and did I mention that those same countries provide aid for the victims of war? The last count I read recently was that the US had provided about $20 Billion in weaponry to Israel and about $1 Billion in aid to Palestinians in Gaza. I imagine that proportion would be similar for other countries helping out in that war.

Those other genocidal conflicts, or should I not call them conflicts when they are so one-sided that ‘event’ may be a more fitting description, that also validates then the term ‘conspiracy of silence’ as so many of those conflicts/events gain little more than the occasional column inch in the major newspapers. I guess, those people are pretty much nobodies, or Muslims, or black, or something which allows them to be considered as less than human, not worthy of defending.

And certainly not bothering to commemorate in a day of mourning.