Protest makes you free

The past fortnight may provide an accurate measure of our self-importance and mind-boggling insularity. As tsunami-struck countries slowly, painfully go about their business of recovery, as the world commemorates the horrors of the Holocaust and as brave Iraqis go to the ballot under the threat of bullets aimed against them and democracy, the Leader of the Opposition is leading an irrelevant protest march against the machinations of this government and a minor cull, not on public holidays, but on holidays in lieu of public holidays when these fall on a weekend! Of such is the feel for history, for occasion, for awe and respect towards defining moments beyond our shores.

Our trade unions have already gone through the self-indulgence Dr Sant thinks it is now his turn to mimic. Little wonder that the outspoken Dr Anna Mallia has called on him to leave if the party is to have a chance of being re-elected. She is correct: what he is giving the party is not leadership so much as a cameo of a long-forgotten form of identification.

And after disproportionate force was used at Safi, Malta was being castigated by its own as some sort of racist premier club. Comments about this appeared in contributions, which in the case of one or two, nodded in the direction of concentration camps. Safi was being metamorphosed into Dachau, which of course trivialises Dachau.

Only an insensitive brute can fail to castigate violence in any form; only inhuman people can witness violence and make any form of distinction or excuse it on grounds of the origins of the victim. We should be careful, though, of concluding that Safi was a racist-inspired assault, or that it makes racists of us all. Before all else it was a failure in military methods of control.

We are better employed questioning why that failure occurred and whether the army's recruitment strategy is what it should be. It is more urgent that we examine the duration of detention experienced by asylum-seekers or illegal immigrants and the conditions under which these live while they are in Malta. We should also analyse and examine in depth, for its correctness or otherwise, the reference made by 25 members of the University's academic staff to "the alarming increase in manifestations of racism witnessed throughout the island". Their obsession with globalisation we may leave with them.

Up to the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz our social partners were still engaged in a puerile game over public holidays, a game dressed up as some monumental struggle over the distress of a day off in lieu being slashed from the calendar. The farce had to be extended, one supposes, because otherwise it would make Dr Sant's protest march even more irrelevant.

And another thing; do you recall the sense of outrage over plastic bags that burst over the island like a thunderclap at the start of the year? It has all vanished into thin air, vapourised by an enterprising culture that is providing the market with cloth bags and biodegradable alternatives. Supermarket clients who are charged 1c for their plastic bags, or 3c in some cases, are using and reusing these instead of generously disposing of them into our overburdened waste system, as they previously did when there was no price attached.

Protest and ballot

Today, as Dr Sant goes about his protest, Iraqis will be going to the polls. Where the relevance of the former is for you to judge, the momentousness of the latter is something else again. That the eyes of the whole world will be watching to see whether the bullet or the ballot will win in Iraq goes without saying.

There are those in the West who would, perversely, like to see the bullet win. They will not express themselves thus; rather, they will claim, if the bullet does win, that it could not have been otherwise. You cannot export democracy. And if it fails? If the ballot overcomes because there are enough Iraqis who will run the gauntlet and promote Iraq to a state it has never known before, the first truly democratic state in the Middle East, however haltingly, however threatened? We know for certain that the Shi'ites yearn for a voice in the government of Iraq, a voice denied them by minority Sunni governments since Iraq was drawn into the map of the Middle East.

Of course if the ballot wins, and decent human beings will be hoping that it does, it will only be the beginning of the beginning. But Europe, in particular France and Germany, will no longer be able to stand aside and look the other way in the presence of a truly sovereign nation; nor will the United Nations, which is still debating whether Darfur is a case of genocide months after it was clear that it is.

Afghanistan has stepped on to the podium of democracy (critics of the American decision to destroy the hold of the Taliban there, forecast the death of hundreds of thousands and tens of thousands of American body-bags. Had they learned nothing from the Russians or, for that matter, the British?). Palestine is doing it; who knows? By next summer the features of the Israeli-Palestinian Question will be changed beyond recognition. Why not Iraq?

Part of the answer lies in the assault by Sunni insurgents on what goes for civil society in that country - the judiciary, the police, the politician-who-would-contest the elections and the voter who wants to vote at these elections. But that is not the whole answer, the greater part of which recognises, however fearfully, that here is a chance. Whence comes such another?

Yet today, when the whole world is gripped by a momentous occasion, Dr Sant has organised his own precipitate event. "No matter how the stand-off between unions, the government and employers ends, the whole saga will count as a remarkable waste of time and trouble", he wrote last Wednesday. I have been saying this for weeks, but the Leader of the Opposition allied his party to that waste of time and backed the unions and workers all the way, adding to the wastage of effort and energy. What he is really saying, of course, is that there may be agreement reached between the social partners. That it was not reached before today may have something to do with today's protest.

Arbeit macht frei

Auschwitz was not the first concentration camp. That dubious honour belongs to Dachau, initially the gruesome guesthouse of unwilling guests, communists and socialists opposed to Hitler and his regime. Even as it went into operation, the campaign against more than half a million Jews, proudly German Jews it needs to be added, began. The conviction existed among many Nazis and other anti-Semites that Jews were a conspiratorial force engaged in a heinous plot to dominate the world in one sense or another. The same thought is sometimes expressed today when the Israeli-Palestinian Question crops up; specifically, that the Jewish lobby in the United States is all-powerful and explains that country's commitment to the existence of the State of Israel.

As the persecution of the Jews created a momentum of its own, Jewish shop-owners, students, doctors, authors, academics, newspaper editors, all came under the hate-filled eyes of the regime. By 1938, they were excluded from the economic life of the country. The roads to Buchenwald, Mauthausen, Sachsenhausen, Ravensbruck, Auschwitz-Birkenau were, or would soon be, well-trodden. Hundreds of thousands never got there. They were simply gunned down, massacred.

Wherever Hitler's armies conquered, mass murders and exterminations followed. By the end of 1941 they had occupied the whole of Europe and were well into the Soviet Union, for which country Hitler entertained an unquenchable revulsion. All this was happening alongside the deportation of as many Jews as was logistically possible to the camps.

Grotesquely, when you think Hitler was responsible for the start of the second world war, the dictator ranted: "If the international Jewish financiers in and outside Europe should succeed in plunging the nations once more (sic) into a world war, then the result will not be the Bolshevising of the earth and thus a victory for Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe". He was keeping his squalid promise.

The commemoration service held at Auschwitz was hauntingly beautiful. Survivors well wrapped up against the cold last Thursday, in furs, scarves, head warmers, must have wondered how they had endured the same conditions 60 years ago, cold, hungry, and dear God, not freed by work. To viewers in their centrally-heated homes a similar wonderment must have been experienced. How?

There are those today who would trivialise the Holocaust by comparing it with what has happened and is happening in other parts of the world. They do wrong. They are wrong. As Dr Steve Paulsson has pointed out: "The Holocaust was the biggest of the killing programmes, and, in certain important ways, different from others. The Jews figured in Nazi ideology as the arch-enemy of the 'Aryan race', and were targeted not merely for terror and repression but for complete extinction. The Nazis failed in this aim because they ran out of time, but they pursued it fanatically until their defeat in 1945."

And yet... history is written by the victors. Among these was the Soviet Union, which is why one of the heads of state attending Thursday's ceremony was Vladimir Putin, the President of Russia.

It was the Soviet Red Army that liberated Auschwitz and the horrendous cargo of ashes into which so many hundreds of thousands of its inmates had been reduced. Mr Putin deserved his place but let us not forget. When the German dictatorship made its non-aggression pact with the dictatorship of the Soviet Union, it was both countries who carved up Poland. That cynical act is not easy to equal. To its west, Poland was on the receiving end of the Germany, to its east, of the Soviet Union. It took Hitler less than two years to tear up that pact and almost bring the Soviet Union to its knees; less than four for Stalin's armies to roll the German armies back and to reach the dead Hitler's bunker.

Stalin had hoped the armies of the capitalist camp would wear each other down as they had done between 1914 and 1918. This time, however, he reckoned they would drop exhausted into his lap as they could not have done in 1918 when Russia was in revolution. Stalin's hope/strategy made sound Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist sense but the dialectic did not anticipate that Hitler would turn on him in midsummer of 1941.

By belonging to the victorious side, the Soviet Union remained in a position where its gulags with their tens of millions of prisoners would go unremarked by any commemoration service for the tens of millions who perished inside them, or on the way to them. Stalin's crimes against his own were no less horrific than Hitler's and included genocide in Ukraine. In this sense alone, the presence of Mr Putin at Auschwitz was not without its irony.

Yesterday's eugenics - today

The BBC Website ran a 78-page timeline of Genocide under the Nazis. In it we find that on July 25, 1939, the parents of a severely disabled child petitioned Hitler for its life to be ended. This killing was sanctioned. A Reich Committee for the Scientific Registration of Serious and Congenitally-based Illnesses saw to it that 5,200 infants were killed through this euthanasia channel.

Sixty-five years later, in Britain, doctors were given the option not to resuscitate a dangerously ill premature (six months) baby and this against the wishes of its parents. Medical evidence claimed that the baby "had no feelings other than pain", and had serious brain, lung and kidney damage. (In Nazi eugenic terms, it is a "life unworthy of life"). The parents are claiming that their child is showing signs of improvement. Paediatric experts maintain that whatever happens, the baby is not likely to live beyond a further year and was likely to succumb to a respiratory infection this winter. She has not done so.

Counsel for the parents was reported as arguing at Friday's High Court hearing that "it was no longer the case that baby Charlotte's life was intolerable and characterised by constant pain'. He cited a medical expert's opinion that Charlotte had 'genuinely good days' when she received no sedatives and was taken out of her oxygen box. She responded to stimulation, had limited perception of light and dark and was able to react, to a limited extent, to noise. Contrary to the expectation of many of the doctors, Charlotte has survived. What's not yet clear is the extent of the change, the reason for the change and the implication of the change". The judge rejected their application to lift the order.

And according to yet another report filed in The Daily Telegraph last week, the Dutch Journal of Medicine published "the first detailed examination of child euthanasia". And "no", the newspaper wrote, "that is not some horrifying misprint". Child euthanasia is being practised by doctors in the Netherlands. The paper's concern is that a Mental Capacity Bill is being discussed in the House of Lords in Britain and it fears an attempt by the government to legalise euthanasia "by the back door".

The Bill has had an amendment drafted on to it since it was debated last month. The amendment is supposed to prevent the killing of patients by neglect, not, note, the killing per se. Hope that the Bill will not be passed is being attached to the fact that one of the peers is the wheelchaired Baroness Chapman, whose parents were told at her birth that she would have "no noticeable mental function".

In August 1939, doctors in Nazi Germany were required to report deformed newborns and the following month 30,000 patients in mental hospitals were killed in German-occupied Poland. They were useless mouths, "life unworthy of life".

How near are we today to this mentality by any other name? We seem to have returned to July, 1939. The ghost of the Reich Committee for the Scientific Registration of Serious and Congenitally-based Illness is hovering around us and about to materialise, is materialising, in Britain's High Court and in the Netherlands.