After sixty years of practice the Germans are very good at these speeches now. But what purpose do they serve?

Vested interests say we must remember the Holocaust because it can never be allowed to happen again. Yet it did happen again: it happened in Pol Pot's Cambodia and more recently in Rwanda. Where were the Jewish voices condemning these crimes against humanity? It seems crimes are only crimes when they happen to the 'right' group of people.

And what came of the Holocaust? The Germans and the rest of the world were so horrified they gave away someone else's land. If the Germans were so guilty why didn't they give Bavara away; or if the English were so guilty why didn't they give away Kent? It's easy to be contrite when you're giving somebody else's home away.

And what about the State of Israel? A state based on religion and ethnicity. A state that has studied Nazi tactics in the Warsaw Ghetto to implement in the Palestinian ghettos? A state that limits the rights of its own citizens based on religion and ethnicity. We certainly did learn from the Nuremburg Laws didn't we?

The Europeans learnt so much from the Holocaust that when ethnic cleansing broke out in the Balkans, while people died, they dithered and did absolutely nothing. Where were the Jewish voices condemning the violence then?

There were around 50 million people killed in the Second World War, and the Holocaust constituted a small percentage of them. Jewish victims weren't any more innocent than the other millions. Subsequent Jewish history has shown that Jewish people have no claim to moral superiority over anyone.

Unfortunatley, the Holocaust has taught the Jews how to hate, taught the Germans how to hate themselves, and taught the rest of us nothing.

We have to get over the idea that NAZIs have German accents. Fascism was popular in Hollywood before Pearl Harbour as Charlie Chaplain discovered. He was scorned for being anti NAZI.

There was also a white scarf movement in Australia, or the National Front, as DH Lawerence discovered in writing his book "Kangaroo". This could happen anywhere, and Australia is particularly vulnerable to being seduced by this way of thinking.

Fascism is about pride, and in its ugliest manifestation where people assume the position of gods over other people, they commit the greatest of the seven deadly sins. Pride is what struck Lucifer to hell as Satan.

We forget how important the wisdom of the Christian Bible clearly points out how evil this kind of thing is.

We don't forget the Holocaust just to remember the Jews and the Germans. We remember is to remind ourselves that this could easily happen here, given the circumstances. Memorials are a warning from experience.

When discussing these issues everybody completely misses the point .

How can we expect harmonious relations when world wide we have peoples who are disenfranchised , obscenely poor obscenely wealthy in a grotesque gauche mix .

The more educated and sofisticated we become the less we care .

Political correctness is partly responsible , you can learn to be politically correct , this stifles debate , "Oh we can't bring that up
we will be lambasted by the Politically Correct".

Millions have starved to death in Africa , do we care , we do , but what can you and I do ? We pay money to the United Nations , why don't they do something , they do , but not while people are being murdered , they supply food if it is safe to do so . The African nations need water , they can grow their own food . When the racial/ tribal mixing stops by transient people moveing back to their homelands supplied with de-salinators supplied by the responsable wealthy.

Forget about the Holocaust that was 60 years ago , more people have died in conflict in contemporary world in "one year" than died in the entire conflict of WW2 .

We should look to the root cause proscribe a practical fix and resile from cleaning up the mess caused by protagonists .

Remember Democracy is really "Rule by the Biggest Mob" who motivated their voters by spin and engaged them with fear .

Cheers....................ideekay

Firstly there are fascists in every country including every parliament, that is extreme right wing, xenophobic, nationalists.(nazis) That does not imply that every right winger is a fascist nor is every right wing government a fascist government. Certainly, many governments are shifting ground, moving further to the right in the political spectrum.
Hitler-right nazism took hold of an unstable layer in Germany in the 1930's, a period of striking financial collapse and breakdown of the German nation state system. There is a very real connection to the national breakdown and nazism. The xenophobic response of these extreme nationalists was the attempt to revere and bolster the national state and mythologise the German race. Fascism supplies a right wing reactionary solution to every problem - fascism represents reaction all down the line! Despite all the reverence about the German nation state there was no solution within the national framework; after all, they relied and were dependant on international markets for trade and finance. They then attempted to reorganize Europe through the colonial plunder of other nation state resources. Europe became a slaughterhouse. Moreover, the concentration camps were built and organised around the big industrialists and their factories. Workers were worked to death on the lowest cost diet. The real meaning of fascism - is the real expression of the highest rates of exploitation for the working class possible. The trade union leaders in Germany played the most treacherous role allowing Hitler to come to power without a shot being fired or a glove lifted. Crucially and all importantly, they refused to mobilize the working class against the nazis. Their rotten treachery did not escape Hitler and attacking them from the right, publicly hung some and marched many off to the death camps. Workers internationally stand in the same trench and nationalism is used as the biggest means of creating divisions for inflicting defeats - nationalism everywhere is the poison for workers! The alternative is the international unity of the working class on a socialist foundation.

@ PortoSalvo "Remember Democracy is really "Rule by the Biggest Mob" who motivated their voters by spin and engaged them with fear".
That is the point that we need to learn if you read carefully.

We can learn many things from the Holocaust. I am not talking about the NAZI experiments, they were really torture under disguise. I mean the sequence of events, the parades and the propaganda. These are etched in parades from Presidential elections to the Olympic movement. Look at the propaganda films like "Triumph over the will" in the DVD shop and you can see what we have copied.

The African example is very serious and without doubt the biggest catastrophe of our times today. No one denies this. Even in trying to fathom what is happening in Africa, we can still learn from NAZI propaganda and how they hypnotized a whole nation.

African dictators like Magabe and so on work on similar formulae. They assume superiority, as I mentioned before, the worst kind of the the worst deadly sin: pride, we can see what is happening there.

I agree that we can say similar things about multinational companies playing god too. Especially the pharmaceutical companies. Some multinationals have done some digusting injustices in Africa exploiting people for money.

The right in Australia stole the real ANZAC spirit. ANZAC day was never meant to be a nationalistic parade. "Lest we forget" the injustice and what the diggers died for. Democracy? Freedom? Was it a lesson to be cautious of the "Empire"?

No one should be "lambs to the slaughter". We have every reason to be cautious about companies and governments assuming that they are gods, That is what we can learn from the Holocaust as well as the real spirit of ANZAC.

The end of the article “Australian citizen David Hicks has now been incarcerated in an isolated American concentration camp for five years, “

Making claims of comparison between David Hicks, an enemy combatant captured in battle and victims of the German holocaust is grossly offensive and diminishing to the memory of those who endured the real suffering in real “concentration camps”.

It is the sort of claptrap which mediocre minds drag out to illustrate points with irrational hyperbole.

When someone can show me American gas chambers being used to exterminate bus loads of children or David Hicks bearing the scars of vivisection experiments or suffering the effects of typhus or cholera because of grossly unhygienic conditions of his incarceration or where he is forced to work for long shifts without pay, then and only then will the Prisoner of War, Hicks be even close to experiencing “concentration camp” conditions.

It is entirely appropriate for Schroeder to address holocaust survivors. It is wholly inappropriate to pretend parallels can be drawn between the children of that holocaust (if a holocaust victim is still alive to day they were children when victims on pre1945) and an adult terrorist.

Johncee1945 “nationalism everywhere is the poison for workers! The alternative is the international unity of the working class on a socialist foundation.”

Oh good one. I am still chuckling and will do for the rest of the morning.

So the “international unity of the working class on a socialist foundation” - would you care to suggest any practical models for deployment or anything which comes close to making that fantasy come quarter way to reality, without destroying the system of trade which makes the generation of exchangeable value (income) possible?