Off the Cuff / My Other Journal

The Worst Thing that can happen keeps happening.

There are so many chilling events in history that it is difficult to pick a specific one. Also, we are not privy to everything that happened from day one, since human history has to be longer, larger, and wider than what our present knowledge covers.

When all of them put together, wars have taken the worst toll on humankind on every area. Next to them are the epidemics. For example Black Death or the Bubonic plague took out 25% of the world's population when approximately 100,000,000 people died in 4 years. Although life doesn't reek with joy when we are threatened with an epidemic, I assume, nowadays, we know enough how to counteract diseases or get our forces together to find new cures.

Related to epidemics of disease is the epidemic of hunger. Just around the corner in the twentieth century, between 1958 and 1962, China experienced a monumental famine that killed at least 45 million people. This hunger problem shows its ugly face every once in a while, but I do trust our humanity that, given the chance, we will overcome it in the future.

What we may not be able to handle are the holocausts as the worst things to happen to people, and I am not only talking about the mid 20th century Holocaust alone. Holocausts happen when military systems go haywire, wars start, and genocide begins.

This has been happening from the early dawns of history to our day. For example destruction of the city of Carthage and genocide of the people by the Romans ending in 146 BC comes to mind.

Einstein said: ""This topic [democracy v.s. autocracy] brings me to that worst outcrop of herd life, the military system, which I abhor... This plague-spot of civilization ought to be abolished with all possible speed. Heroism on command, senseless violence, and all the loathsome nonsense that goes by the name of patriotism -- how passionately I hate them!"

When central control in a country is not there, it is very easy for corruption, crime, and anarchy to surface, and tyrants become powerful in a time of chaos. Then religion or any fanatical participation in any one cause or belief, together with its perverse interpretation, provides a strong motive to masses to participate in oppressive behaviors because they believe what they are doing is for a greater cause. This is what Einstein meant by "herd life."

In my lifetime, during the early 1940s, 6 million Jews were wiped off the face of the earth. Adolf Hitler had tried to impose what was called the "final solution," which was the systematic extermination of all the Jews in Europe.

Just when we thought we would not allow anything like that to happen again, in less than three decades, the world faced the Cambodian Genocide. During the Khmer Rouge's reign of terror, Cambodia was destroyed in every fashion and area imaginable. Since records weren't kept, the death toll probably equaled to three million, a quarter of the Cambodian population.
Haing Ngor, a doctor, writes about this in his memoirs Survival in the Killing Fields. This book traumatizes the reader, the same as the Nazi atrocities. Reading it disturbed me greatly, in regard to my conviction that we wouldn't let such things happen again after the World War II Holocaust.

Then, right after that, in the twenty-first century, Darfur killings began in 2003. As of today, according to news, over 480,000 people have been killed, and over 2.8 million people are displaced.

For the first Holocaust in my lifetime, yes, Adolf Hitler is to blame, together with the "herd" who followed him, but I'm afraid there will be many other Hitlers, unless we find a way, globally, to stop them. One way is to be educated on the beginnings of all the holocausts. There are many themes in these horrific events, themes of prejudice--racial, religious, and gender-based--, and the acceptance of the herd mentality of normal people doing bad things that are socially approved.

Why couldn't we do anything against them? Why we still can't? Will another holocaust happen again? It keeps happening, doesn't it?

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Prompt: April 1, 2014: In your opinion, what is the worst event in history to have ever taken place? Could something like this possibly happen again?