Short memory

Short memory
On January 27, Holocaust Memorial Day, one of my students of fourth grade, Nassim (of Moroccan origin) asked me what I thought about the minute of silence that the school observed during the first hour in occasion of the Holocaust commemoration. Then he added:- See, Professor, we interrupted the lesson, observed the minute of silence, and then resumed the lesson as if nothing had happened: not a debate, a discussion, nothing. So, in my opinion, like this it's useless.I replied that he was absolutely right. Of course, the minute's silence is sacrosanct and should be observed: January 27, as everyone knows, is the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz by the Russians in 1945. The Holocaust, a horror that caused about six million casualties (at least 2  outside of the camps, while the Wehrmacht advanced to the east) is to be remembered and remains the subject of indelible memory. However, and I believe that this is under the eyes of everyone, the memory is not often perpetuated in the right way.

                                            

Every year, during the last week of January, about this topic we are overwhelmed, if not bombarded with initiatives, programs, films and the like, not always quality ones, indeed, sometimes the result of hasty works: some pursue even marginal sides of facts, with an almost morbid taste. The final result, beyond the good intentions and the quality of a part of this production, is hammering, without much possibility of reflection, just as claimed by my Nassim. Even a colleague of ideological orientation completely opposite to mine (he is from the far left) agreed with me that Holocaust Memorial Day has become a routine, imposed from above and tired, with the huge risk to empty it of its meaning .To this I would add another observation. A few years ago, in November 2011, I attended a seminar organized about genocides by the Legislative Assembly of Emilia Romagna, with various scholars of the Holocaust Museum in Paris. Some of them underlined that it has become customary to use disconcerting comparisons, which equate the Holocaust with the most diverse phenomena (for example, with violence against women, a strange habit that I have noticed several times in feminist articles on the topic), as if everyone wanted to appropriate the aura of Jewish victims. This is unfair and ends up debasing the memory.
 
All this while anti-Semitism is growing alarmingly in Europe. According to Le Figaro (http://www.lefigaro.fr/actualite-france/2014/03/31/01016-20140331ARTFIG00169-les-juifs-de-france-emigrent-en-masse-vers-israel.php) the emigration of Jews to Israel from France, which has the largest Jewish community in Europe (almost half a million of inhabitants), has increased exponentially in recent years (1917 in 2012, 3280 in 2013, it's growing in 2014 and perhaps gets around 8,000 departures in 2015), especially for a widespread perception of insecurity. One of my former students, who has a French passport, confided to me that, around Paris, there are neighborhoods where Jews do not dare to set their foot anymore out of fear of anti-Semitic violence. On 7 May 2015 Raidue broadcast the shock film 24 jours. La vérité sur l'affaire Ilan Halimi about the terrifying story of Ilan Halimi, a young Jew  kidnapped and literally massacred by a group of criminals motivated by anti-Semitic intents between January 20 and February 13, 2006 (cfr. http://www.ilgiornale.it/news/cronache/je-suis-ilan-film-choc-sul-giovane-ebreo-trucidato-nella-ban-1124708.html ).
 

 
The film, directed by Alexandre Arcady, met considerable resistance in France and was virtually boycotted in Paris: it puts a sharp focus on the climate of disbelief among the police that, despite the desperate pleas of Ruth, the mother of Ilan, did not take into account the anti-Semitic matrix of the kidnapping. And, in fact, as it has been reiterated by the authorities of the French Jewish community after the events of past 7 - 9 January, the French Jews do not feel protected. Just on 27 January, the Italian newspaper Il Foglio was sold with the kippah, the traditional Jewish headgear, because now the Jews, in France and elsewhere, risk their lives just wearing it, as it were the Nazi yellow star (see http://www.ilfoglio.it/esteri/2016/01/27/perch-noi-ebrei-rischiamo-la-vita-indossando-la-kippah___1-v-137519-rubriche_c937.htm ).Undoubtedly, the spread of anti-Semitism in France is due in large part to the extremist Islamism, spreading like wildfire in recent decades; French mosques have been subsidized by Saudi oil and Saudi Arabia spreads throughout the world a model of Salafi Islam, which is the radical matrix of most Sunni terrorist groups in circulation (see the fine book by Thomas Grimaux, The black book of the new anti-Christian persecution, 2009). Moreover, I dare say that secularist France, erasing the religious side from public life, can not but ignore it even in tragic circumstances: Hexagon officials, too often, are no longer able to understand anything about religion, even fundamentalist tendencies or anti-Jewish persecution.
 

 
However, there is also something else. For personal reasons I studied relational manipulators, which are the most difficult personality described by psychology: it is a personality that uses others for ends, enacting a series of dysfunctional behaviors (see the good books by the French specialist Isabelle Nazare-Aga). Now I omit psychological problems, but suffice my observation: whole political and social systems, and not only, can act as well as manipulative individuals. At the level of communication, manipulators have a definite attitude: they do not listen, do not talk, they pass from expressing ideas in a vague and confused way, to arrogance, if not to violence, shouts and insults; they think without any gradient, "black and white" and lack of respect for others; they flatter, lie, or foment quarrels and contempt (see my blog on this subject, http://annaritamagri.blogspot.it/2015/11/chi-sono-i-manipolatori.html ).And it's under the eyes of all that in our social communication more and more lack of listening, violence, insult, confused communication and devoid of content, arrogance, howl dominate; and, since the truth is never "black or white", together with violence lies too often spread. This is certainly not the cultural background where you can feed debate, dialogue, reflection, indispensable to prevent a new wave of violence, in particular anti-Semitic one (and beyond). Hammering on the memory of the Holocaust in a mechanical way, without giving room for discussion, ends up being another form of indoctrination imposed from above, that abandones to their fate our Jewish brothers. We live in a society with a strong manipulative trend, which always more sacrifices the exchange of ideas, for the benefit of vulgarity and insult. Without a substantial recovery of dialogue and the values ​​of respect, memory will become increasingly unnecessary and, since memory is first and foremost an intellectual faculty, without the help of a solid rationality, memory will become sadly a short memory.