Crimes against humanity
Last week I was on vacation, having taking time off to research my genealogical roots in the Ukrainian city of L’viv. My father was a holocaust survivor and forever scarred by the loss of his entire family to the insane Nazi eugenics machine. To cut to the chase, the scars of the second world war, the former communist government and now the assault of big business to capture yet another market has the Ukraine doing worse than she should and should be a reminder to us all of the profound turmoil that chaos and unplanned change brings to nations.
As I walked the streets of L’viv, once a centre of culture and learning that inspired not only the Hapsburg government of the mid 1800s, but the world, I listened to the echoes of the past and saw everywhere ghosts of vanished Jews and Poles, and I drank in the lesson that says, “Those who do not learn from History are doomed to repeat it”.
What am I talking about?
It is a tragedy that our human timeframes are so short, making us feel as though the present is immutable and cast in temporal concrete, giving us the perception that we are different and outside the great forces that knock at our gates, as they did time and again for our predecessors. 1939 was such a time, when the political forces of Europe reached a roiling cusp that forever altered the world and threw away reason and compromise. Almost seventy years later so many of us still walk in that terrible shadow trying to make sense of it. I could not help but wonder, whether today we too are in a bubble of smug delusion, watching not political forces or human armies alining themselves against us, but those of the environment. Will our children, seventy years from now search the ruins of what once was, for some tiny understanding, explanation of why it was that when so many sounded salient warnings, we still marched off in lockstep to be annihilated by our own hubris?
Will we look at the leaders of our political and business world of today and in the aftermath of a wrecked environment demand an ecological Nuremberg? Are these so called leaders with their shortsightedness and myopic perspective, today through their inaction inviting those who survive to issue proclamations of crimes not only against humanity, but of crimes against life itself?
If we invite chaos into the world, knowingly risking so much for so many, are we not guilty as charged? Are not the companies and their boards of directors and the governments who supported them, those who sidestepped and subverted all the rules and moral guidelines for profit, obfuscated until there was nothing but chaos and destruction, as guilty as the warmongers of seventy years ago?
Just a question that came to mind as I searched for the boy who played amid the towering chestnut trees in long ago Lvov.