By Krista Kafer krista555@msn.com “Truth will come to light; murder cannot be hid long.” Launcelot in Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice was so right -- and it's even harder to keep the bodies buried in this age of mass media. They show up on the evening news, their silence demanding justice from the living. Sometimes they are heard.
The Colorado General Assembly this year proclaimed April 23-30 as Holocaust Awareness Week, and this past Monday, May 8, as Genocide Awareness Day. In House Joint Resolution 1032 they urged the state to “teach and remember the past while raising awareness of genocides present and future.”
Although genocides occurred before the 20th century, technological advances have enabled governments to kill on an unprecedented scale. The German Nazis murdered six million Jews and another five million Slavs, gypsies, political and Christian dissidents, disabled Germans, and others innocent peoples. The killing would have continued had the allies not succeeded in putting an end to the Third Reich.
Another evil ideology, however, has taken more lives; far, far more. According to The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression, Communism accounted for some 94 million deaths over the past century.
Communist Genocide Soviet Union 20 million People’s Republic of China 65 million Vietnam 1 million North Korea 2 million Cambodia 2 million Eastern Europe under Communism 1 million Latin America 150,000 Africa 1.7 million Afghanistan 1.5 million
Even as its power appears to wane, a dark night begins elsewhere. Government backed Muslim militias called the Janjaweed have killed hundreds of thousands of Sudanese villagers (mostly Christian and animist) and left millions homeless and starving. Islamoterroists target civilians of all religions including their own around the world.
While Americans rally in support the Sudanese victims and condemn the brutality of Hamas and other terrorist organizations, they mostly ignore the death of innocents at home.
Over a million unborn children are murdered in the womb every year in the United States -- including as many as 18,000 in Colorado. Worldwide, 46 million children die every year from abortion. Unlike many others, these victims rarely gain notice.
Without the will by the rest of us, to act on their behalf, the slaughter of innocents is only a story on the evening news if it is seen at all.
Spoken over a century ago, John Stuart Mill’s words ring true today. “Let not any one pacify his conscience by the delusion that he can do no harm if he takes no part, and forms no opinion. Bad men need nothing more to compass their ends, than that good men should look on and do nothing.” The soil pools with the blood of children while men and women go about their business.