Should Know Better

An account of the experiences of one Primo Levi (1919 -1987) during his incarceration during the Holocaust was played out in a telly-play last night. I had seen it before but caught the last half again.

I sat watching with horror and disgust but gradually this was overcome by an intense anger that all this that had happened to this man, a Jew, and passed on down the generations to be remembered ( "Lest We Forget") is now being pissed up against the wall dividing Gaza from Israel.

I watched and listened and heard every word;
of capture, fear, hatred, sickness, despair and horror.

So
WHAT ARE THEY DOING?

They say the guard is as much a prisoner as the captured, incarcerated.
Can it be?
So
THEY WHO SHOULD KNOW BETTER
are now doing the same to another peoples.

After years, nay millennia, of stories of pain, prison, racism, hatred
Should these same people now inflict the same on another group?
YES
THEY WHO SHOULD KNOW BETTER
to be careful of what they do, they set up, they create in the their name of 'freedom' and 'justice' another generation whose memories of history will echo down the decades.

They -
Make me despair
make me hate
make me ashamed of their (in)humanity

The very same that was inflicted upon them for two thousand years, let alone in Germany last century.
They have suffered SO much of that
.. and now -
they bomb, kill, maim, make fearful, despairing, shaming us all...all of our humanity....
ALL OVER AGAIN.

They
WHO SHOULD KNOW BETTER THAN ANYONE.

The things they say about the
cruelty, inhumanity, lack of compassion, duty of care, fear, hatred and pain of their lives down the ages-
They now do - are doing - the very same.


They say
Those parents who commit corporeal punishment upon their children and say ( whilst hitting them):
"I'll teach you!!!!!"
DO teach how to carry the very same acts out upon their children and more.

And so -
Through stories and history and keeping alive the holocaust maybe, just maybe,
They have indeed TAUGHT the following generations how to behave.
The did TEACH and so they become like the Nazi's and the Palestinians will become the new Jew.

THEY SHOULD HAVE KNOWN BETTER.