The recent commemorative event at Auschwitz was a bitter reminder of the abominable cruelty man is capable of inflicting on his fellow man.

Such inhumanity is the outcome of frightful pagan philosophies that exclude perennial God-given values. These amoral ideologies opened the floodgates of unbridled brutality, making political expediency the new religion that even considered fellow men as Untermenschen, subhuman beings.

Unfortunately, Auschwitz is just the tip of an iceberg of evil. Hitler had no morals. He did not think twice about wiping out the Brown Shirts, his own paramilitary militia of glorified thugs, who were instrumental in bringing him to power. He did not hesitate to eliminate all those who opposed him, to exterminate the aged, the mentally retarded, the handicapped and all the individuals he considered useless or obstacles to the creation of the Thousand Year Reich. His own people were the first to be subjected to torture, summary executions, the gas chambers and sent to concentration camps.

The West was incredibly indifferent to the devastating economic and social conditions in Germany; conditions that created a fertile breeding ground for Hitler's ruthless Nazi ideology. Meanwhile, in Russia under Stalin, mass murder on an unprecedented scale was already a well honed political tool. Before World War II, millions of Russians were already killed in the purges, staged famines and gulags of that era.

By the end of World War II, besides the six million Jews, the Nazis had killed up to 3.5 million non-Jewish Poles, up to six million Slavic civilians, about four million Soviet prisoners of war and 1.5 million political dissidents, as well as around half a million Gypsies and thousands of homosexuals. These mind boggling statistics of wholesale murder do not include the horrendous war casualties. Two million Russians alone died at the siege of Leningrad and, numerically, the Russians suffered the highest casualties... over 20 million.

It is a shame that the tragic fate of Poland as a result of Soviet and Nazi collaboration is still largely disregarded. It was the criminal connivance of Stalin with Hitler that led to the infamous 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop pact that facilitated Hitler's invasion of Poland. Poland was carved out between both Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia and the first two years of the war brought unspeakable destruction to the Polish population and culture at the hands of both totalitarian regimes. Besides the Nazi atrocities, the Soviet systematic killings of the Polish intelligentsia and officers in Katyn forest as well as the deportations of 1.5 million Poles - mostly Catholics - to the Soviet Gulag took place before the Shoah came into force.

In his speech at Auschwitz, Vladimir Putin referred to the 600,000 Russian soldiers who died in what he called the liberation of Poland. Yet, despite the Russian soldiers' sacrifice, Poland was not liberated but occupied once again. Notwithstanding the heroic contribution of Poles in the fight against Nazism in the worst theatres of the war, the Polish resistance uprising in Warsaw was deliberately denied assistance by Russian forces and 250,000 Poles perished paving the way for the Communist takeover that continued to deny Polish independence for almost half a century.

These realities form part of the historical scenario that showed no respect for human life. Auschwitz should remind us of the words of the Jew, Elie Wiesel, a survivor of the concentration camps, who said: "I swore never to be silent whenever human beings endure suffering and humiliation. We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor never the tormented".

Unfortunately, even today, the West seems to remain silent in the face of so many unfolding injustices. We live in a culture of subjective morality which legalises euthanasia (one of the cornerstones of Nazi ideology) and abortion. We promote economic models that trample on the basic rights of so many communities by denying them access to markets and rendering their products uneconomic, thanks to rigging the system of fair trade. We are indifferent to the suppression of the cultures and the persecution of so many minorities. We deny and ignore the legitimate aspirations of Palestinians, Kurds, Tamils, Chechens, etc...

Wars, crass exploitation, famines and environmental degradation in many parts of the world carry on unabated, giving rise to waves of desperate refugees on an unparalleled scale who flee to the West.

Besides remembering the past, Auschwitz should provide us with the opportunity to seriously reflect on what is happening in the present. In commemorating the genocide of the Jews in Europe we should commit ourselves to fight injustice and suffering everywhere without any distinction of race or creed.

We must be determined to fashion a world where evil is recognised for what it is, everywhere, in its entirety, otherwise such commemorative events will be reduced to parades of high level posturing and misrepresentation.