UAF Scotland will be commemorating Holocaust Memorial Day in Edinburgh on Wednesday 24th of January 2018 at 7pm, Room LT G.03, 50 George Square, University of Edinburgh. The event is supported by Stand up to Racism Edinburgh.
Holocaust Memorial Day marks the anniversary of the day that the Nazis’ concentration camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau was liberated in 1945.
We believe it is important to remember the reality of what it means when fascists take power – so we can redouble our efforts to drive back the fascists today.
When Hitler’s Nazis came to power in Germany, they smashed working class organisations, political opposition and civil institutions – right down to the Boy Scouts – paving the way for the Holocaust. Concentration camps were established, imprisoning a wide variety of the Nazis political opposition.
In the Holocaust, the Nazis murdered six million Jews, along with millions of others who the fascists considered to be “undesirable” or “inferior”, including Roma people, socialists and communists, trade union members, gay men and lesbians, disabled people, black people, and non-Jewish Polish and Russian people.
The mass murder of the Holocaust was carried out on an industrial scale and has been called killing “by assembly line”, with death camps linked by the European rail network. The planned, relentless murder of the Holocaust is unique, though tragically, not the sole mass murder or genocide, historically. The death camps were organised to create a massive, killing machine.
Today, in Britain and across Europe, fascist parties wish, as Hitler did with Jews and others, to scapegoat refugees and Muslims, alongside, their venal anti Semitism. They range from the serious electoral threat of the Front National in France to Hungary’s Jobbik, despite the latter’s recent attempts to rebrand. Golden Dawn, in Greece, see their leaders on trial for murder and for a series of attacks on minorities and refugees.
In the UK, the BNP and EDL have been successfully pushed back by UAF and others. The Nazis in the UK are currently fragmented, but they seek to grow again.
While in the 1930s and 1940s the Nazis’ main targets were Jews, in recent years, fascists, especially in Eastern Europe, target Roma people, alongside Muslims and refugees.
Holocaust Memorial Day is an opportunity to remember the victims of the greatest crime in human history, but also to commit ourselves to the fight against racism today.
