Leading To Barbarity

Imagine a poll with questions deliberately designed to obtain a specific result. Such polls do exist. So how much credence can be placed in what results from them? With questions that skirt an issue, but make skewed references to that issue in the most ambiguous manner to elicit a particular response certain to gladden the hearts of those whose purpose in parsing those responses to obtain a designed outcome has been a roaring success.

The Canadian-Ukrainian community and the Canadian-German community, for their own reasons, have been decidedly uncomfortable with the initiative originally undertaken by the Jewish owner of a news conglomerate, to make plans to engage the public and receive government support in the building of a Holocaust Museum. Those ethnic communities have been outspoken and vociferous in their rejection of a Museum to commemorate the Holocaust though the concept of that museum was altered to reflect a presence as a Museum of Human Rights.

That museum would of necessity reflect the issue of genocide, and the single most extreme example of an ethnic-religious-cultural group of people singled out for systematic social isolation, mass incarceration and finally annihilation on a carefully calibrated and designed scale that would see success in the extinguishing of six million lives of men, women, children of all ages would be front and centre. What united the victims as victims was their Jewishness.

Others suffered a similar fate under the Nazis during World War Two; political prisoners, the mentally and physically impaired, gypsies, homosexuals and many clerics who defied the fascists. But it was for Europe's Jews that special attention in weeding them out of the general population, removing their human rights entitlements, slandering them, pauperizing them, and systematically murdering them that makes this attempt at eradicating Jews from the face of the Earth special.

There were others who suffered grievously throughout modern history; the Russians, Chinese, Poles, Ukraines, Rwandans, Cambodians; the list is long and dreadful. Many still suffer, in North Korea, Burma, Sudan and elsewhere in the world as they are exploited and torn from their land, maimed and slaughtered. They will have their place in The Canadian Museum for Human Rights which is also designed to offer a special place to commemorate the Holocaust and the Aboriginal experience in Canada.

This afflicts its critics with the angst of having their particular dreadful political, social, existential experiences take second place. All the other miseries and dread occurrences experienced by other people in other times and other places are meant to have their place in the Museum. Its critics demand that all be given equal space and equal place; that there be no special memorial for any one dire event.

Ignoring the reality that many other countries of the world consider the Holocaust to represent a unique and dreadful event in human history, needful of its own memorial as a remembrance to what human beings are capable of descending to. So in their need to succeed in turning public opinion to their support, the poll was designed to elicit a desired response. The poll, undertaken by NANOS Research, commissioned by Canadians for Genocide Education.

Canadians for Genocide Education describes itself as a coalition of 50 associations representing 27 different ethno-cultural communities. There is no Internet presence, and its volunteer chairman is an Ontario lawyer who was once head of the Canadian Arab Federation, James Kafieh. The 44-member group he claims to represent is a peculiar one. Some when contacted claim never to have heard of him or the coalition.

Others could not be contacted as the contacts were 27 years stale, others had no working telephones or contact information. But Mr. Kafieh is adamant that the focus of the Museum is quite wrong, and represents the result "of politicians pandering to a special interest group". Of course Mr. Kafieh would be intimately familiar with the considerations and agendas of 'special interest groups'.

Lybomyr Luciuk, director of research for the Ukrainian Civil Liberties Association, another staunch detractor of the main focus of the Canadian Museum for Human Rights, and which aided in the funding of the poll, insists the results of the poll confirms that a museum funded by taxpayers must not give 'preference' to one group's suffering over that of another's.

"I know this will sound harsh, but there is fundamental ignorance [on the museum board] of history and a preoccupation with their own community's suffering", Mr. Luciuk explained, neatly summing up his own and his partners-in-adversarial denial of the original purpose of the Museum's own singular, self-involved agenda.

"This is not a genocide museum", clarified Angela Cassie, director of communications for the Museum. "It's a museum about human rights. And, she points out, the Holocaust is the most meticulously documented genocide in history, and as such is eminently capable in its presentation of teaching in the most absolute manner how abuse of human rights leads to dreadful barbarity.

So let's hear it like it is. The Winnipeg museum, a federally-funded institution, which will also be funded by private and corporate subscriptions is meant to have an area dedicated to the carefully planned and executed murder of six million Jews. It is intended that atrocities committed against Canadian Aboriginals will receive similar treatment. Other atrocities will be housed collectively in an adjacent area of the Museum.

This is not a display of the hierarchy of suffering, it is an object lesson in the degradation of humankind, using as its focal point the most singular descent into the black hole of nihilistic destruction through meticulous state and ideological planning ever documented. The poll that asked a few relatively innocuous questions about preferences, never once referencing the Museum itself, resulted in 60.3% of Canadians polled expressing a preference for "one exhibit which covers all genocides equally".

More than adequately reflecting the Canadian spirit of egalitarian compassion. Without informing those whose opinion was being solicited any of the inconvenient details. Which leads one to the indelible and damning impression that a rather nasty, hidden agenda to have a conclusion reached that would reflect the demands of a disparate, grudging group afflicted with anti-Semitism will stoop to any means to validate their point of view.