Today is International Holocaust Remembrance Day, in which we remember and honor those that were murdered by the Nazis in the concentration camps. This date was chosen because it is the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. I have not had the privilege of visiting any of the former concentration camp sites, but I have visited Yad Vashem in Jerusalem on multiple occasions. This picture is one of my favorites that I took on one of the visits, it is taken of a train cattle-car that was used to haul innocent people to their deaths. Most people see this from eye level, but I walked around and took this from below, it is appropriately called – train car to oblivion.
On this remembrance day, I hope you will take time to pause and remember. But don’t stop there — look for ways that you can bring peace. Peace to your family, peace to your community, peace to the world.
I am almost finished with one of the most disturbing books that I have read in a long time. It is Assassins by Mike Bond. My high school English teachers would have a field day with the writing style and syntax, but it was the themes that disturbed me the most.
The story begins in Afghanistan, as the US takes the decision to use the local Afghanis to bottle up the Soviet Union who had invaded the country. The main protagonist is Jack, and the book tells snippets of his life story, as we learn he is a paramilitary commando hired by (I assume) the CIA. I found the beginning of the book fascinating. As the story continues we move from the 1982 all the way to 2015 with “Jack” involved in all kinds of undercover operations from Iraq to Pakistan. There were two things that I found disconcerting. First, he touched on my deep and hidden Islamophobia. Time and time again, he made my prejudices come to the surface. Sometimes he challenged that phobia, other times he massaged it and made it more comfortable. The second issue was with his take on the history of the period. I found myself going back and forth, looking up claims that he made about the US government and its role in events from US funding of the Mujahedeen and Taliban, to the knowledge and role that Bush played in 9/11. Did the US government know about the potential attack on the twin towers beforehand? Did Bush know that there were no WMDs in Iraq? Did we have opportunities to eliminate Osama Bin Laden earlier and intentionally let them pass? All those and other perplexing questions are left for you to wrestle with.
In the second half of the book, the story gets lost in all of these questions, and at times I am not sure of the point he is trying to make. But clearly the overall thrust is found when he quotes Longfellow about ⅔’s of the way through the book.
If we could read the secret history of our enemies we should find in each man's life sorrow and suffering enough to disarm all hostility.
In the end, I think Bond is trying to remind us that violence is a vicious circle and the more we use violence to quash our enemies, the more enemies we make. His storytelling is okay, but it gets lost in his trying to outline what went wrong with US policy in Iraq and Afghanistan. Not sure I would read another one of his books.
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