98,000 Jersey residents failed to turn out for this year's Holocaust Memorial Day.
Mostly the small usual crowd did.
I bumped into a friend there with his mother. Her father (his grandfather) was one of the 22 sent from Jersey in the 1940s to a cruel end in the death camps for some trifling offence.
Of course this family has a personal reason to remember a lost relative but why do the vast majority of Jersey residents show such little interest?
Furthermore, why is our governemt still dragging its feet when it comes to signing the most basic international human rights standards and has still not actually implememnted anti-discrimination laws as promised by Chief Minister Ian Gorst one year ago, at last year's Memorial Day.
See that interview, along with similar interviews on this blog for previous years during the relevant January
Sorry, but I still do not do links....
Jersey's official attitude towards anti-discrimination laws is a disgrace. The Channel Islands were the only area of the British Isles to be occupied during the Second World War so have a special reason to lead the way on implementing the highest human rights standards. Yet Jersey is going in the opposite direction with ever more discriminatory anti-immigrant rules and regulations on work and housing etc being currentlyapproved or contemplated.
Tragically, these absurd laws are to be exempted from challenge as discriminatory because they are introduced by the government!
Yes - I know - the wind gets into the camcorder and spoils the sound on these recordings. It's the winter weather and I have only a simple machine and limited ability - but try to live with it. You won't hear or see this stuff elsewhere.
I declined to interview Brian Keenan - this year's special celebrity speaker - for several reasons. Notably that the official sound system was so bad and he spoke so quietly, that I was unable to hear what he had said. This was a pity but I am also concerned that Jersey's Memorial Day is being turned into yet another "official event", dominated by the usual government crowd and promoting the same unchallenging views, year after year.
If anything warrants challenge - then it surely is "holocaust" - and the millions of people who allowed it in the past, continue to allow it now and will fail to stop it happening in future.
I mean of course you and me and our governmental institutions.
Doug Ford follows here in my second part of today's posting on the Holocaust Day's proceedings.
He has an educational role at the Jersey Heritage Trust and is a really nice bloke - but is surely missing the point here...
Of course, I am linking Holocaust Day to Jersey Reform Day which is to be celebrated officially for the very first time this year on 28 September. This is a belated response to Jersey's very own revolution against the despotic government of the 18th cnetury - and should be full of human rights lessons - but Doug Ford seems to dismiss it as unimportant or not well enough understood or researched....
Such revolutions are the very breeding grounds for holocausts along with xenophobia and the blame levelled at minority groups for the ills of society.
Ignorance and apathy applies as much to the events of the Second World War as they do to the fight for democratic government in Jersey over 200 hundred years ago...
And finally I present the Dean of Jersey Bob Key and would contrast him with Canon Cohu referred to in his own address today. The Canon protested during the Occuptaion and became another of the brave Jersey 22 who perished in the death camps.
The Dean spoke at a ceremony on 16 January 2013 to re-consecrate the memorial in Green Street cemetary to St. Helier's 19th century Constable Pierre Le Sueur (see the posting on this blog) and his words then are relevant today regarding holocausts past, present and future and what WE should ALL be doing about them...
But, I may be a romantic idealist because I don't believe that the argument needs martyrs (crucified or otherwise) to prove the point or that we should appear once a year on a cold windy day, just to remember - for a few minutes - those who have suffered so much. We really should be actively doing much much more on a daily basis...
The final image is of "our government and officials" laying their wreaths at today's Holocaust Memorial ceremony whilst so resolutely turning their backs against the call for proper democratic instutions with human rights embraced and promoted with enthusiasm for ALL.
Sorry again about the wind nuisance - but if you cannot overcome that mild irritant to understand what is being said here, then there is nothing more I can do about it...
