In school, many of your teachers will ask you if something as awful as the Holocaust could happen again. Could there ever be someone as bad as Hitler, would we allow there to be more camps, is it possible to care so little that we’re willing to send people to places like the gas chambers, and is there someone that we could hate so much that we’re willing to do again? Millions upon millions of people died during the Holocaust, but the awful question is if there is the slightest possibility of this occurring once again. We have been taught to learn from our mistakes by being taught about the horrific events of the past, but is that really enough to keep people from hating? Although we learned about the Holocaust in history, and read about it in English there are so many cases in which we’re repeated history. Look at how many economic crashes we’ve had, assassinations, genocides, shipwrecks, engineering disasters, school massacres, mass extinctions, military miscalculations, the list goes on. Why would things be any different since we’ve already done it so many times? The Holocaust is one of those cases where we’ve learned about it for so long that we know it’s horrible and that it can never happen again, but is that really enough?

One example that is happening all around us is the case with Muslims. Donald Trump, the new president of the United States, has talked about cutting off all immigration with the people of the Muslim religion because they are a threat to our country. This is a similar situation to the Jews because they are being judged and turned down because of their religion. What happens next? Do we kick all Muslims out of our country? Maybe after that we’ll confide them all into one country. Then after we get them all in one general place we’ll put them into ghettos. Do you see where I’m going with this? It’s sad to say, but this is the same general idea. We’re really far off from this at the moment, but if we continue to treat people the way that we are, this won’t be too far off. What about the Muslims that need help? The reason why these people want into this country is to be free from what’s happening in their own. They are running from what we are trying to prevent from happening here, so why is it so impossible for us to let them in? If someone wants to hurt our country, they’re going to find a way. In the Universal Declaration of Independence Article three states “Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of person.” These people that we’re preventing from coming into our country are trying to get some security because they just don’t have it now.

The Holocaust is considered a genocide, “the deliberate killing of a large group of people, especially those of a particular ethnic group or nation.” Although the Holocaust was so awful, it is not the only one we’ve had. Between 1915 and 1923, 1.5 million Armenians, Assyrians and Greeks  were killed. During the Rwandan genocide, 800,000 people were killed. With the Bosnian genocide, an estimated 100,000 died. In 2003 there was the Darfur genocide killing 300,000 and displacing over 2 million people.

Although we have been taught about tragedies such as the Holocaust, that doesn’t mean that it can’t happen again. When we learn about things to prevent them from happening, we need to really learn about it and what makes it so awful. We should talk about our morals so that we know where our limits are. This cannot happen again and if our way of preventing it is by teaching, then we need to make it one hundred percent clear that it really can’t happen. There needs to be no chance of the Holocaust repeating itself, and although that is impossible, it’s what needs to be done.

http://endgenocide.org/learn/past-genocides/

http://www.un.org/en/universal-declaration-human-rights/